Tag Archives: Jeff Lieberman

The Abysmal Magnetism of ‘Just Before Dawn’

Want to dig into your favorite filmmakers’ favorite horror films? Look no further than 1981. The horror landscape of that year was eclectic, with strong representation for slashers in particular. But even in a competitive field, Jeff Lieberman’s Just Before Dawn has emerged as one of 1981’s most notable slashers. The title evokes feelings of serenity more than terror, but don’t expect anything tame. Leberman is here to unleash the hounds.

It’s important to remember how often horror uses the cover of darkness to hide its monsters. Here, Lieberman lets the day break over his audience with the dread-inducing accompaniment of Brad Fiedel’s synth score. Nestled underneath is a kind of atonal whistle (not unlike the hate motif that opens West Side Story). Instead of overcoming the rigidity of your immediate social programming, this call entices a feral impulse. It teases the viewer. By the end, the connotation of a calming, peaceful moment before sunrise turns into something much more sinister.

Lieberman leaves little to the imagination when we meet the first of our killers. And really, what is a slasher without its opening kill? In many cases throughout the ‘80s, this is the scene that either establishes or continues a series tradition by lovingly blending lore with gore. In Just Before Dawn, two men giddily discuss hunting a buck before turning into prey themselves. The killer watches them through a hole in the ceiling of a decrepit chapel. His face is dirty and he’s built like the mountains that provide scenery. He locks eyes with one of the men as he mercilessly brings his wrath on them. There is not a single deity or piece of technology that they can rely on for salvation. Lieberman leans hard on religious pessimism in a movie about inbred psychopaths.

When we first hear the call from the mountain, it feels as though the land itself is making the sound. When we meet our cast of unlucky campers, they pass through the environment as disrespectfully as one would expect. Ogling at a pair of destitute children (twins) like a zoo exhibit and mindlessly throwing whole food items out of the window of their van. There’s no penalty for rooting against them from the minute they appear. 

Upon realizing how much of a nuisance these people are, park ranger Roy McLean (George Kennedy) confronts Warren (George Henry), the so-called “owner” of a sizable piece of land deep in the mountains. During this exchange, Warren smugly brandishes a deed from his lawyer to an exasperated McLean. The campers attempt to slyly mislead the ranger so as to not get any surprise visits. But McLean knows that, killer or not, these kids aren’t built for any sort of living out in the wilderness. 

The film’s cinematography is a constant, humbling reminder of how out-of-place some characters are in the outdoors. Just Before Dawn may have been buried alongside other woodsy slasher pics, but it is the strongest for how its themes motivate the image. As the campers traverse the mountain, up roads and across rope bridges, Dean and Joel King’s photography engulfs them in greenery. The tone at any given moment in the film is threatening. However there are times when even the characters stop to marvel at the untouched beauty around them. Warren’s girlfriend Connie (Deborah Benson) is particularly mesmerized. They acknowledge the contradiction of owning any part of the land before Warren laughs off the challenge. His confidently sheltered outlook on life proves deadly.

Speaking to that point, Just Before Dawn observes the time-honored slasher tradition of goofy white people dancing to muzak before getting their asses handed to them. Though despite how mean-spirited this film is, Lieberman certainly knows how to shift the balance between stone-cold dread and humor. It boasts the karmic resonance of ‘70s horror, films where a group of self-centered characters find out just how badly the universe has it out for them. One character, Jonathan (Chris Lemmon), is slashed by one of the Mountain Twins and narrowly escapes falling to his death after the killer cuts the rope bridge. A close up of Jonathan shows us the haggard man able to climb up the other side, only to be met by the second killer. He is kicked in the face and sent tumbling to his doom. Towards the end of the film his body washes up in a creek where Connie and Warren are playing with a fish.

Many characters in Just Before Dawn share a similar fate. And on first watch, it’s uncanny how closely the film’s rhythms match several of its contemporaries. Yet it isn’t the midwestern romp of Don’t Go In The Woods. Nor does it engage in moralistic drama like The Burning. There’s a line about a summer camp that hits a little too close to be coincidental. But death in this film is more than just about putting people down. The evil in mountains, and it’s influence, is mythological. This film’s equivalent to Friday the 13th’s Crazy Ralph goes mad in the face of “the demons” that dwell there. His psychosis is part trauma, part realization that the abject horrors of the wild are no match for civilization. It’s curious how Lieberman drives this point literally from the destruction of vehicles and food items, to the image of the rotting chapel that is used in its scariest sequences. Even something as simple as a whistle, which Jonathan carries with him as a gag, only to need it later, is a tool that produces a weak sound compared to the animalistic call.

Caught up in this breakdown of earthly possessions that the group rely on for survival is a make-up kit. When we meet the cultish family of the mountains we see that one of the daughters, Merry Cat Logan (Katie Powell), fixates on the cosmetics. She doesn’t know how to apply any of what she’s using, but her intentions are clear. There is a yearning for a life outside of the wilderness. For a moment, she takes on the role of Ruby in The Hills Have Eyes. Merry Cat sympathizes with the young people her family is hunting. Lieberman seems to set this up as a noble—if thematically naive—story progression, even if he is not overly concerned with setting these matters neatly. 

The significance of the make-up box is one of the film’s strongest visual metaphors. It is played for laughs when one of the women in the group, Megan (Jamie Rose), becomes visibly upset after it is taken from her. Merry Cat sees Megan and Connie as examples she hopes to emulate.  The film’s awareness of psychosexual qualities in the nascent slasher genre is not lost in this dynamic. Interestingly, it is mainly Merry Cat who assumes the role of voyeur whenever sexual situations arise. She is a substitute for the plotting gaze, usually a male killer. For her, the idea of make-up being an affirmation of womanhood and civility is briefly entertained. Regardless, Connie takes center stage as the film’s protagonist once bodies start to drop. This trip has awakened her to the possibilities of wielding power in both worlds.

For the majority of the runtime, Connie puts up with Warren’s denial of the severity of what is happening around them. Benson plays the character as disconnected from her body yet eerily perceptive. Through her, as it does through its landscape photography, the film explores the esoteric nature of the mountain. We watch Connie listen offscreen for the animalistic call and become entranced by the fireside. She quietly gathers information as we parse through how, if at all, there will be any survivors. One of the killers is shot in the head and falls directly on top of her. This is a catalyst for Connie to take control of her own fate while Warren cowers nearby. 

When the moment presents itself, Connie lures the second killer out of the forest. Similar to how Amy Steel throws on Mrs. Voorhees’ sweater to trick Jason, Connie fixes her face. The warmth of motherhood and the promise of sexual gratification are unnervingly one in the same in both films. After a brief struggle, she chokes the Mountain Twin to death and scares Merry Cat away. Here, the film’s examination of duality comes full-circle. It ends as Connie discovers how to channel savagery through civil means. Lieberman and his writing team may have given evil a physical form, but this ending feeds on the ambiguity of evil as an indestructible force. One that nobody is impervious to, should they stick around long enough to answer its call.

Aside from some surface similarities, the deluge of 1981 slasher films had one important thing in common: negative critical reception. If you only experienced slashers through consumer guides, your impression would be that they are unscary, dismal rip-offs. Hedonistic works of cultural terrorism measured in “m.p.g.p (murders per gallon of popcorn).” Dominant reactions like that is why it has been heartening to see a renewed cultural appreciation for all the gutter of slasher cinema offers. And in such a busy year, it is unsurprising that non-franchise entries slipped through the cracks. Let alone one as understated as Just Before Dawn. I am thankful this film found its way to me. Even (or especially) if it forces me to consider the fragility of my social surroundings.

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Drugs, ‘Blue Sunshine,’ and the Failure of the Hippie Generation

The urban legends surrounding LSD during the 1960s were as frightening as any horror film. Tripping babysitters place infants in ovens; gun-toting police officers go insane after accidentally getting dosed; careless acid freaks permanently blind themselves by staring directly into the sun. They all feature the same alarmist hyperbole or outright fabrications seen in so many pieces of “straight talk” drug education propaganda from that era, and can be a wonderful source of campy good fun.

Writer/director Jeff Lieberman’s 1977 sophomore effort Blue Sunshine seizes on this absurdity by taking the nightmarish fantasies concocted by conservative groups and putting them in a world where they’re actually true. It’s a great bit of “Drugsploitation,” but the cult film is so much more than clever satire and suspense. Blue Sunshine is also a window into the disappointment, bitterness, and disillusionment felt by a generation towards the bloody demise of 1960s flower-power idealism.

The film follows Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King), a man who stumbles upon a terrifying epidemic of violence and mayhem that’s set to overtake America. Back in 1967, a strain of LSD called Blue Sunshine was created by a campus drug dealer at Stanford University and sold to 250 other students. The drug seemed harmless enough but triggers a terrible side-effect: everyone who dosed ten years prior turns into hyper-destructive lunatics. They appear normal at first but then come the headaches, terrible nightmares, and rapid hair loss, until finally these thirty-somethings devolve into an army of homicidal maniacs.

In an atempt to figure out how to stop the rash of killings sweeping the city, Zipkin tracks down Blue Sunshine’s creator, Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard). Unfortunately, Flemming is now a politician campaigning for a seat in congress, and is willing to do anything to silence Zipkin and have his past sins buried. 

Lieberman has said in interviews that the inspiration for Blue Sunshine came about simply from asking the question, “but what if they were right?,” regarding those old scaremongering anti-drug pamphlets from back in the day. That might be true, but his film also has an incredible amount happening just below the surface. A decade before its release, the hippie movement was in full swing and America was in the throes of the “Summer of Love.” This was a massive countercultural event where an estimated 100,000 flower children traveled to San Francisco to live and preach a philosophy of peace, free love, and nonconformity. 

“You could strike sparks anywhere,” writes Hunter S. Thompson in his masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, and that we were winning.” Thompson – a realist who believed deeply in his country but was also skeptical of almost everything and everyone – had been swept up in the movement’s wave of optimism. So when that perceived momentum towards a new utopian ideal suddenly halted and receded, he and so many others experienced a palpable sense of defeat. The Manson family, Altamont, and the losses of both counterculture and civil rights icons all acted as the death knells of the hippie movement, leaving a generation of lost souls in its wake.

In Blue Sunshine, we see that time and distance has transformed that sense of mourning into bitterness. This resentment is aimed not only at the lost potential of the period, but towards the reality that so many former hippies went on to become everything they strived to set themselves apart from. This is most obvious in the character of Ed Flemming. 

The person we see in the decade-old photograph uncovered by Jerry Zipkin is a man lightyears away from his present day incarnation. Sporting long hair, a seashell necklace, and the dazed (almost pious) look of a guru, he is a far cry from the clean-cut politician Zipkin later meets. The once radical Flemming has traded in his freaky hair and mind-expanding substances for well-cut suits and a chance to ascend to a new station that promises power and privilege. 

His arc is a familiar one. Many from that era abandoned more radical schools of activism and attempted to effect change by becoming a part of the system they used to speak out against, the argument being that they could change its mechanisms once they had been embedded inside. Unfortunately, it’s obvious within moments of Zipkin’s first meeting with Flemming that the politician is more interested in self-preservation than helping his fellow man. 

Initially he’s all smiles, handshakes, and “aww shucks” down-home charm. It’s the type of superficial front saved for potential voters, and it’s clear Flemming has the act pinned to a science. But the moment Zipkin asks about Blue Sunshine and his relationship with a local police detective who has inexplicably murdered his entire family, Flemming immediately shuts down. The man’s true face appears as his warmth evaporates, leaving a cold impersonal exterior. Suddenly sensing a threat to his political aspirations, he dismisses Zipkin, signaling for his hulking aid to intervene.

Whether or not he is aware of the terrifying aftereffects of the substance he created is unclear, but what’s obvious is this: when his drug-dealing past catches up to him, Flemming doesn’t give a damn about the tragedy that befell the detective’s family or its connection to Blue Sunshine. All he cares about is how it might threaten his professional career. Power is the one thing on his mind now, and nothing will take away his chance to grab it. He is a chilling character if only for the fact that he and his actions feel steeped in a realism that is familiar and discomforting.

Beyond Flemming, there’s also the unnerving and ingenious design of Blue Sunshine’s maniacs that hints towards a sense of disenchantment with the flower-power movement. Essentially inverted hippies – bald, blank-faced, and hyper-violent – these oblivious-ticking-timebombs have since left their bohemian lifestyles behind and become upstanding members of society. They are police officers, political aids, the neighbor down the hall that’ll watch your kids with nary a moment’s notice. They embody and exaggerate the shift in political and social philosophies made by so many people of that generation from one extreme to another. Liberalism to conservatism. Idealists to materialists. Counterculture to the establishment. 

In reality, the swing from one end of the spectrum to the other was (and still is) a subtle one, which is somehow far more unsettling. Over the course of the next decade, most ex-hippies went back to the suburbs, returning to their middle-class lifestyles. But others went on to become CEO’s, powerful lawyers, and (like Flemming himself) affluent politicians. The same people who tried to change the world by promoting harmonious coexistence slowly lost grip with their values and grabbed hold of a way of life that stood against everything they once believed. It’s not as dramatic as rapidly losing all your hair, taking whatever weapon is close by, and suddenly laying siege to everything and everyone around you in a berzerk rage, but it might be equally as frightening.

Blue Sunshine’s critiques of the hippie movement are certainly bleak, but it’s the film’s black sense of humor that ultimately keeps it from becoming (for lack of a better phrase) a total bummer to sit through. Just when things get a little too real and a tad too depressing, you get to watch a crazed maniac lumber Karloff-like through a crowded discotheque, tossing bedazzled dancers around like sacks of potatoes while the actor’s bald-cap does its damndest not to slide loose from his head. Moments like that are the sugar that makes Blue Sunshine’s socio-political commentary go down smooth. Coupled with that humor is also a thread of optimism that runs through the story in the form of its hero, Jerry Zipkin.

In a film full of turncoat flower children, Zipkin is the hippie that moved on from the movement but never lost touch with its ideals. He stands up for equal rights (the former lawyer recently quit his job at a prestigious firm due to their refusal to hire more women), is a pacifist (he makes a marked decision not to use lethal force during his final confrontation with Ed Flemming’s towering fixer who also happens to be a Blue Sunshine burnout), and even still sports the luscious locks so many of his peers have sheared off by then. If Blue Sunshine is a cinematic world where raving anti-hippies represent creeping conservative greed and selfishness, then Zipkin stands for the folks who never let those insidious influences take hold of them. 

Ultimately, what makes Blue Sunshine such a standout from that era is that it has something to say but doesn’t take itself so seriously that it enters the realm of hand wringing. Maybe that’s the reason it doesn’t come up in discussions of other “important” 70s horror movies, or maybe it’s the fact that it continues to be woefully underviewed. Whatever the reason, its reevaluation of the hippie generation and its legacy is a memorable one, and makes Blue Sunshine (like the drug itself) a movie that will stay in your system long after that first post-watch high.

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Podcast: Leigh Monson on ‘Satan’s Little Helper’

For decades now, Hollywood has grappled with the role that violent video games play in popular culture. From desensitizing audiences to real-life violence, to straight-up suggesting that video games inspire teenagers to kill, Hollywood’s legacy of video game dramas might charitably be described as mixed at best. And then there’s Satan’s Little Helper.

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Written and directed by cult icon Jeff Lieberman (Squirm), Satan’s Little Helper is a gonzo blend of ’70s slashers and ’90s after-school specials, showing what happens when one young boy becomes obsessed with helping Satan rain destruction upon his sleepy Northeastern community. Often funny and always ridiculous, it’s one of those movies that has to be seen to be believed.

In this episode of Certified Forgotten, The Matts are joined by film critic Leigh Monson to discuss those cult classics that horror fans can never really shake. They also discuss the thin line between horror and humor, and why Satan’s Little Helper is a movie in a league of its own when it comes to striking a balance between the two. So buckle up, power up, and get ready for a low-budget horror film you’ll never forget.

The Satan’s Little Helper episode of Certified Forgotten is now available to stream on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or the podcast platform of your choice.